The quantification of the social sciences: an historical comparison

Abstract

From the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, the various social sciences were gradually quantified. This quantification was seen as a symbol of their accession to scientific status, making them comparable to the natural sciences. However, this tendency followed relatively different paths in each of these disciplines. While the history of this quantification is now well documented in numerous studies, there have been fewer attempts to conduct comparisons between the social sciences from this perspective. Does the way in which each of the social science disciplines appropriated the tools of statistical and probabilistic analysis have anything to tell us, not only about its specific epistemology and methodologies but also, from the perspective of the sociology of science, about its actors, networks, norms, legitimacy criteria and controversies? We will not be attempting to answer such wide-reaching questions here, but we will be putting forward a modest provisional framework for comparing five disciplines, namely history, sociology, political science, economics and psychology. Each of them is of course a complex world in itself, divided into various movements and schools of thought, each with its own paradigm and shot through with controversies if not bitter disputes. In general, however, what characterises a discipline is a relative consensus on what we don’t agree on among people who are in the habit of challenging each other. On the other hand, there are fewer comparisons between one discipline and another, for reasons linked to the sociology of the academic and scientific worlds. Each discipline is a disciplined world, largely closed in on itself, with its own vocabulary, paradigms, institutions, professorships and journals. This is why using the history of the modes of quantification as an interpretative framework and as a symptom of something that can be assumed to be characteristic of these five worlds may not be a bad idea, even though such an exercise is obviously extremely reductive.